The sixth report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is alarming—but not surprising.

The panel’s first assessment of scientific research on climate change in 1990 found that burning fossil fuels substantially increases the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases—including carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, and nitrous oxide—causing a rise in the global mean temperature and warming up the world’s oceans.

“Consequent changes,” the first report said, “may have a significant impact on society.” //

Policy makers, scientists, and concerned citizens who pick up the final version of the report might be surprised by one thing, though: It is dedicated to an evangelical Christian who said the root problem of climate change is sin.

“Looking after the Earth is a God-given responsibility,” John Houghton once wrote. “Not to look after the Earth is a sin.”

Houghton, who died of complications related to COVID-19 in 2020 at the age of 88, was the chief editor of the first three IPCC reports and an early, influential leader calling for action on climate change.

His concerns about greenhouse gases, rising temperature averages, dying coral reefs, blistering heat waves, and increasingly extreme weather were informed by his training at as atmospheric physicist and his commitment to science. They also come out of his evangelical understanding of God, the biblical accounts of humanity’s relationship to creation, and what it means for a Christian to follow Christ. //

As Houghton saw it, some religions teach that the Earth and the material world are evil. But the Bible teaches that creation is good, and depicts humans as gardeners divinely commissioned to cultivate and care for the world.

“We are more often exploiters and spoilers rather than gardeners,” Houghton wrote. “Some Christians have misinterpreted the ‘dominion’ given to humans in Genesis 1.26 as an excuse for unbridled exploitation. However, the Genesis chapters, as do other parts of scripture, insist that human rule over creation is to be exercised under God, the ultimate ruler of creation, with the sort of care exemplified by this picture of humans as ‘gardeners.’”

Houghton began to reach out to evangelical leaders to talk to them about the coming ecological crisis. He was influential in convincing Richard Cizik, John Stott, and Rick Warren to make climate change a priority and talk about it as a spiritual problem. //

According to Malcolm, who is now preparing for ministry in the Church of England and writing a doctoral dissertation on theology and climate grief, Houghton thought it was it was impossible to convince people to protect something they didn’t love. He wanted Christians to learn to love their environment and let climate change science move them to repentance.

“Our desire to be gods drives a great deal of the destruction around us,” she said. “There is something in the work of climate science that reveals the consequence of our sin, troubles those in power, and calls for us to sit with that, but also be aware that an alternative is possible—an alternative to our sin.”

Houghton didn’t live to see the release of the sixth IPCC report or to promote it to evangelical Christians. But the scientific assessment dedicated to his memory echoes a core theme of Houghton’s life’s work: Now is the time, it says, to turn from the path of destruction.

Chemicals used to prevent worms and rot seems to have changed the wood's structure. //

Some of the most sought-after violins on the planet may owe their sounds to deworming chemicals used by their Italian manufacturers 300 years ago. //

The authors are quick to note that they were working with wood shavings, not an entire instrument, so how a little sprinkle of metal changes, or even improves, sound remains to be seen. But what’s clear is that the violins are different from anything made since.

A science YouTuber has won a five-figure bet from a physics professor after he proved a wind-powered car could move faster than the wind while driving downwind.

Derek Muller, who runs the YouTube channel Veritasium, made the bet with Alexander Kusenko, a physics professor at the University of California, after Kusenko messaged him saying that it was impossible for the car to travel faster than the wind propelling it, according to Vice.

So Muller proposed a $10,000 wager with the professor saying that he could prove it. The pair signed an agreement to the bet, which was witnessed by Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Characterizing the current warming as an urgent and impending crisis is silly considering the scientific evidence we have today. There is no need to remove national boundaries, form a global government, and abandon capitalism to “save the world.” Climate changes, we all accept this, perhaps it is mostly man-made, perhaps it is mostly natural, we don’t know. What we do know is that many communities may be affected by climate change. Sea level is rising, the best long-term estimates are that it is rising between 1.8 and 3 millimeters per year. This is not a large rate, perhaps seven inches to a foot in 100 years, much less than the daily tides. But, if it causes problems, seawalls can be built, people can move from dangerous areas or elevate their houses; it is a problem that can be dealt with locally, as it has been for thousands of years. Why use a global solution? //

Gordon J. Fulks, Ph.D. is a physicist, originally from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research. He is currently one of the Directors of the CO2 Coalition, a group of prominent scientists and economists who point out that carbon dioxide and water vapor are the entirely beneficial byproducts of our civilization. He has been fighting the good fight against knaves and fools pushing climate alarmists’ draconian economic solutions for a nonexistent problem that have become manifested in a “Green New Deal.” In a letter below, he provides a colleague with a succinct scientific argument that can be used to educate people about global warming. It is repeated in its entirety with his permission with the hope that the arguments presented can be used by many to combat the Left’s environmental propaganda:

The researchers had gathered together to dig up part of an experiment: an unusual long-term experiment that started in 1879 on the campus of what is now Michigan State University.

A botanist named William Beal wondered how long seeds could remain viable underground. So he designed an audacious study to find out, knowing full well that the answer might not come in his lifetime.

Frank Telewski, a professor of plant biology at the university, explains that Beal got 20 glass bottles. "Those 20 bottles, he filled up with a sandy seed mixture," says Telewski. "And the sandy seed mixture contained 21 species of plants, with 50 seeds per plant."

The plants were just common weeds. The idea was to find out, if farmers faithfully weeded their plots, how long these annoying plants could keep coming up from seeds already in the dirt.

Beal buried the bottles in the ground, keeping the location private so it wouldn't get disturbed. Every five years, he dug up one bottle and checked to see if the seeds inside would germinate. In 1910, when Beal retired, he passed on the experiment to a colleague, who later passed it on to a colleague and so on.

The study has lasted far longer than Beal intended because its caretakers decided to stretch it out. Instead of every five years, they switched to digging up a bottle every 10 years. Then, every 20 years. Telewski helped unearth a bottle in 2000, when he took over the experiment from a colleague. That year, only a couple of different weeds were still able to sprout. //

The researchers waited and waited for about a week. Then, on the afternoon of Friday, April 23, Lowry checked the tray of seeds and saw one tiny green seedling. That means at least one old seed could still germinate, and more could sprout in the days to come.

"We know that seeds can last a really long time in perfect conditions, like in seed storage vaults or the permafrost," says Weber, who notes that Beal's original question is still relevant. "We don't really know how long seeds can last in the soil. And that's where most of the seeds are." //

With four bottles left in the ground, the study should go on for another 80 years.

Besides leading to increased COVID deaths due to fewer vaccinations, Kulldorff said, the vaccine pause also was likely to decrease people’s trust in vaccines. Public trust in COVID vaccines has been shaky, with the percentages of poll respondents saying they wouldn’t get such a vaccine fluctuating between 21 and 50 percent since last July. Hesitancy about vaccines in general has also increased in the past decade.

Both pausing the J&J vaccine and refusing to acknowledge its low blood clot risk can increase vaccine hesitancy that can damage lives, Kulldorff said: “It reduces the confidence in vaccines that is unnecessary and damaging. All of us who work with vaccines know about this vaccine hesitancy and we work hard to maintain confidence in vaccines.”

Two methods for reducing hesitancy are public transparency and early detection of negative outcomes, he said. That’s why he recommended keeping the Johnson and Johnson vaccine on the market while also encouraging women at risk of blood clots from it to take one of the other two COVID vaccines.

Instead, the CDC communicated unwarranted certainty about the vaccine to the public, potentially costing lives. //

Kulldorff has repeatedly publicly stated that he does not support “let it rip,” but “focused protection” of well-known high-risk populations, such as the elderly and those in nursing homes. In a March panel with DeSantis, for example, Kulldorff said, “Lockdown is just a form of ‘let it rip,’ but at a little bit of dragging it out more, and by dragging it out more it actually makes it more difficult people for older people to protect themselves, because they have to do it for a longer time. So ‘let it rip’ is not a good strategy.” He also publicly countered the John Snow claim that natural COVID infection does not confer immunity.

Given this, the CDC pushing Kulldorff out of helping oversee vaccine safety systems he helped invent smacks of retaliation against a scientist who has dissented against scientifically indefensible positions repeatedly communicated to the public by top CDC officials.

Last week, Google pulled a video of DeSantis on March 18 discussing COVID-19 with medical scientists Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas, who all hail from elite institutions — Stanford University, Harvard University, and Oxford University. All but Gupta, who is based in the United Kingdom, also joined DeSantis’s April 12 press conference to respond to Google’s ban.

“For science to work, you have to have an open exchange of ideas,” Bhattacharya said Monday. “If you’re going to make an argument that something is misinformation, you should provide an actual argument. You can’t just take it down and say, ‘Oh, it’s misinformation’ without actually giving a reason. And saying, ‘Look it disagrees with the CDC’ is not enough of a reason. Let’s hear the argument, let’s see the evidence that YouTube used to decide it was misinformation. Let’s have a debate. Science works best when we have an open debate.”

“I’m very worried about the future of science because science is dependent on free exchange of ideas and it has been for 300 years now. So if this continues, this kind of attitude, the censoring of scientific views, then I think we have reached the end of 200 years of Enlightenment,” Kulldorff said Monday. //

“The lockdowns are the single biggest public health mistake in history,” Bhattacharya said on the banned March 18 panel. He said lockdowns are psychologically compelling to rich societies terrified of death, but are not only ineffective at stopping disease and death, they also make both worse. He noted a few minutes later:

The international evidence and the American evidence is clear: The lockdowns have not stopped the spread of the disease in any measurable way. The disease spreads on aerosol by droplets, it’s a respiratory disease. It’s very difficult to stop. The idea of the lockdown is incredibly beguiling… but humans are not like that. What’s happened instead, we’ve exposed working class, we’ve exposed poor people at higher rates. We’ve created this illusion that we can control disease spread when in fact we cannot. //

Lockdowns Are Bad for People, But Good for Google
Keeping people at home indefinitely has also drastically increased people’s screen time, which provides Google more ad revenue and influence over how people think and the information they receive. Screen use is correlated with obesity, and obesity puts people at a dramatically higher risk from COVID-19.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 78 percent of those hospitalized with COVID were obese, and lockdowns have directly contributed to a huge increase in First World obesity, especially among children. Among people who have died while COVID-positive, according to the CDC, 94 percent had other significant medical conditions, including diseases exacerbated by obesity: diabetes, cardiac arrest, and heart failure.

“The laptop class, they have protected themselves through the lockdowns while we have thrown the working class under the bus,” Kulldorff said during the panel discussion Google banned. //

On Monday, DeSantis noted the irony of Google banning professional discussion from doctors whose scientific research has been cited by Google Scholar more than 10,000 times, more than 17,000 times, and more than 25,000 times, respectively. //

Three of the four doctors on the March 18 panel authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement now signed by nearly 14,000 medical scientists and more than 42,000 health practitioners, as well as nearly 800,000 “concerned citizens,” that promotes based on the scientific evidence the policy of focused protection in response to COVID, instead of ineffective mass lockdowns.

Three major discoveries during the last century contradict the forecasts of scientific atheists, pointing instead in a distinctly theistic direction. //

In fact, three major scientific discoveries during the last century contradict the expectations of scientific atheists (or materialists) and point instead in a distinctly theistic direction.

First, cosmologists have discovered that the physical universe likely had a beginning, contrary to the expectations of scientific materialists who had long portrayed the material universe as eternal and self-existent (and, therefore, in no need of an external creator). //

This evidence of a beginning, later reinforced by other developments in observational astronomy and theoretical physics, not only contradicted the expectations of scientific materialists, it confirmed those of traditional theists. As physicist and Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias observed, “The best data we have [concerning a beginning] are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole.”

Second, physicists have discovered that we live in a kind of “Goldilocks universe.” Indeed, since the 1960s, physicists have determined that the fundamental physical laws and parameters of our universe have been finely tuned, against all odds, to make our universe capable of hosting life. Even slight alterations in the values of many independent factors — such as the strength of gravitational and electromagnetic attraction, the masses of elementary particles, and the initial arrangement of matter and energy in the universe — would have rendered life impossible. //

Finally, discoveries in molecular biology have revealed the presence of digital code at the foundation of life, suggesting the work of a master programmer. After James Watson and Francis Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, Crick developed his famed “sequence hypothesis.” In it, Crick proposed that the chemical constituents in DNA function like letters in a written language or digital symbols in a computer code.

Functioning computer code depends upon a precise sequence of zeros and ones. Similarly, the DNA molecule’s ability to direct the assembly of crucial protein molecules in cells depends upon specific arrangements of chemical constituents called “bases” along the spine of its double helix structure. Thus, even Richard Dawkins has acknowledged, “the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.” Or as Bill Gates explains, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”

No theory of undirected chemical evolution has explained the origin of the information in DNA (or RNA) needed to build the first living cell from simpler non-living chemicals. Instead, our uniform and repeated experience — the basis of all scientific reasoning — shows that systems possessing functional or digital information invariably arise from intelligent causes.

We know from experience that software comes from programmers. We know generally that information — whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in radio signals — always arises from an intelligent source. //

Stephen C. Meyer directs Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle. His new book, "Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe," is now available from HarperOne.

tokamaks are reactors which use thermal input and super-powered magnets to convert a cocktail of relatively abundant hydrogen isotopes into a self-sustaining plasma of unimaginable heat and radiance. Researchers are fine-tuning tokamaks at various labs around the globe, hunting for energy breakeven, the tipping point where the plasma in the tokamak generates at least as much energy from fusion as it requires in externally supplied thermal energy. Once breakeven has been achieved, mankind will be on the cusp of a limitless source of clean, self-sustaining energy, which for any number of reasons will be extremely bitchin’, at least until the science is bought by venture capitalists and sold back to the public at a price that effectively makes its owners gods. //

We have been assured by several researchers that whatever else is true about the development of tokamak science, the jillion-degree star juice in the core of the reactor can not be fired or ejected or otherwise expelled from the torus, due to physics or chemistry or whatever, and therefore cannot cause Chernobyl-like cataclysms. //

But now a PPPL researcher—one Fatima Ebrahimi, pictured above (right)—has designed a new “plasmoid rocket” concept which applies the ultra magnets and so forth of tokamaks in such a way that superheated plasma is used to generate thrust and propel a rocket through space, thus solving one of the most vexing challenges associated with manned travel into deep space: storing enough fuel to power a spacecraft all the way from Earth to Mars. Ebrahimi’s rocket concept harnesses both the juice of the Sun and the mechanics of solar flares to do magical magnet things and go vroom through space.

The new Princeton concept works by using the same mechanism that helps to blast solar flares away from the Sun. These flares consist of charged atoms and particles called plasma, which are trapped inside powerful magnetic fields where complex interactions take place.

For propulsion systems, Ebrahimi is particularly interested in one type of interaction called magnetic reconnection, which is where magnetic fields in highly charged plasmas restructure themselves to converge, separate, and re-converge. As they do so, they generate large amounts of kinetic energy, thermal energy, and particle acceleration. It’s a phenomenon not only seen on the Sun, but also in the Earth’s atmosphere and inside Tokamak fusion reactors, like PPPL’s National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX).

https://newatlas.com/space/magnetic-reconnection-rocket-thruster-concept-spaceflight-mars

Researchers only drilled through an Antarctic ice shelf to sample sediment. Instead, they found animals that weren't supposed to be there. //

Bivouacked in the middle of the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf—a five-hour flight from the nearest Antarctic station—nothing comes easy. Even though it was the southern summer, geologist James Smith of the British Antarctic Survey endured nearly three months of freezing temperatures, sleeping in a tent, and eating dehydrated food. The science itself was a hassle: To study the history of the floating shelf, he needed seafloor sediment, which was locked under a half mile of ice.

WANDA: I listen to actual scientists, and they say your idea will never work.

DILBERT: If a chipmunk listens to scientists, should I trust the chipmunk to understand what he heard?

WANDA: I don't get your point.

DILBERT: And yet you do understand science?

One of the most striking features of the disease is the disproportion between its severity and the simplicity of the cure. Today we know that scurvy is due solely to a deficiency in vitamin C, a compound essential to metabolism that the human body must obtain from food. Scurvy is rapidly and completely cured by restoring vitamin C into the diet.

Except for the nature of vitamin C, eighteenth century physicians knew this too. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another. //

Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world—depression, autism, hypertension, obesity—will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious? //

But the villain here is just good old human ignorance, that master of disguise. We tend to think that knowledge, once acquired, is something permanent. Instead, even holding on to it requires constant, careful effort.

Earth generates heat. The deeper you go, the higher the temperature. At 25km down, temperatures rise as high as 750°C; at the core, it is said to be 4,000°C. Humans have been making use of hot springs as far back as antiquity, and today we use geothermal technology to heat our apartments. Volcanic eruptions, geysers and earthquakes are all signs of the Earth's internal powerhouse. //

The average heat flow from the earth's surface is 87mW/m2 – that is, 1/10,000th of the energy received from the sun, meaning the earth emits a total of 47 terawatts, the equivalent of several thousand nuclear power plants. The source of the earth's heat has long remained a mystery, but we now know that most of it is the result of radioactivity. //

The decay of one uranium-238 nucleus, for example, releases an average of 6 neutrinos, and 52 megaelectronvolts of energy carried by the released particles that then lodge in matter and deposit heat. Each neutrino carries around two megaelectronvolts of energy. According to standardized measures, one megaelectronvolt is equivalent to 1.6 10-13 joules, so it would take around 1025 decays per second to reach the earth's total heat. The question is, can these neutrinos be detected? //

Two recent experiments have added to the research: KamLAND, a detector weighing 1,000 metric tons underneath a Japanese mountain, and Borexino, which is located in a tunnel under the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy and weighs 280 metric tons. Both use "liquid scintillators." To detect neutrinos from the earth or the cosmos, you need a detection method that is effective at low energies; this means exciting atoms in a scintillating liquid. Neutrinos interact with protons, and the resulting particles emitted produce observable light.

KamLAND has announced more than 100 events and Borexino around 20 that could be attributed to geoneutrinos, with an uncertainty factor of 20-30%. We cannot pinpoint their source, but this overall measurement—while fairly rough—is in line with the predictions of the simulations, within the limits of the low statistics obtained.

Therefore, the traditional hypothesis of a kind of nuclear reactor at the center of the earth, consisting of a ball of fissioning uranium like those in nuclear power plants, has now been excluded. Fission is not a spontaneous radioactivity but is stimulated by slow neutrons in a chain reaction.

Published: 19 December 2018

The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) presented the linear no-threshold hypothesis (LNT) in 1956, which indicates that the lowest doses of ionizing radiation are hazardous in proportion to the dose. This spurious hypothesis was not based on solid data. NAS put forward the BEIR VII report in 2006 as evidence supporting LNT. The study described in the report used data of the Life Span Study (LSS) of A-bomb survivors. Estimation of exposure doses was based on initial radiation (5%) and neglected residual radiation (10%), leading to underestimation of the doses. Residual radiation mainly consisted of fallout that poured down onto the ground along with black rain. The black-rain-affected areas were wide. Not only A-bomb survivors but also not-in-the-city control subjects (NIC) must have been exposed to residual radiation to a greater or lesser degree. Use of NIC as negative controls constitutes a major failure in analyses of LSS. Another failure of LSS is its neglect of radiation adaptive responses which include low-dose stimulation of DNA damage repair, removal of aberrant cells via stimulated apoptosis, and elimination of cancer cells via stimulated anticancer immunity. LSS never incorporates consideration of this possibility. When LSS data of longevity are examined, a clear J-shaped dose-response, a hallmark of radiation hormesis, is apparent. Both A-bomb survivors and NIC showed longer than average lifespans. Average solid cancer death ratios of both A-bomb survivors and NIC were lower than the average for Japanese people, which is consistent with the occurrence of radiation adaptive responses (the bases for radiation hormesis), essentially invalidating the LNT model. Nevertheless, LNT has served as the basis of radiation regulation policy. If it were not for LNT, tremendous human, social, and economic losses would not have occurred in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident. For many reasons, LNT must be revised or abolished, with changes based not on policy but on science.

Joan Feynman, sister of a Nobel laureate, made her own mark in physics despite her mother’s doubts

New polls have shown that when it comes to trust in the science community, we’re seeing a double-digit fall among the American people. According to The Hill, two separate studies have confirmed that the reputation of institutions and scientists have taken a hit in the last few months: Two new surveys show most Americans still trust leading scientists and institutions like the Centers for Disease ...

We’ve been training people to believe that when a scientist says something, it’s akin to God handing down a declaration from on high but in reality that’s just not the case. Scientists are figuring out a universe we don’t understand little by little as an infant figures out the world it’s born into. The amount of things we don’t know is overwhelming and will likely stay that way for thousands of years. A “discovery” by a scientist is nothing but one small spec of dirt on a mountain of dirt, and even then, he might not fully understand the spec he found.

I think more skepticism of the scientific community is needed, and especially when it comes to scientists who claim to know the thing they’re talking about inside and out. Especially when it’s reported on by biased reporters who treat science like a booty call.

Log scales are for quitters who can't find enough paper to make their point properly.

Fuel energy density, in MegaJoules/kg

• Sugar 19
• Coal 24
• Fat 39
• Gasoline 46
• Uranium 76,000,000

How to LEARN faster with the Feynman technique:

Pick a topic you wanna understand and start studying it
Pretend to teach the topic to a classroom
Go back to the books when you get stuck
Simplify and use analogies!

Teaching a powerful tool for learning.
Brain

Richard Feynman
@ProfFeynman
It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.

Cornell University Lecture, 1964

Darwin evolved his theory with criticism from different professionals and social sectors. The canonical edition, therefore, is the sixth and not the first.